


knight

by brophigenia



Series: that boy is a monster [5]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Kinda?, Kylo Ren Redemption, M/M, Mentions of Past Sex Work, Post-Canon, Suicidal Ideation, That's Not How The Force Works, mentions of past underage, sorta?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 20:30:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11066559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: i was filled with poisonbut blessed with beauty and rage





	knight

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh. Got a little weird here, guys. Went a little off-script. Let me know if it sucks. Summary from Lana del Rey, opening quote from Euripides. Next up is the epilogue.

_ come back;  _ _   
_ _ even as shadow, even as dream.  _

He’s never tended to a corpse before. 

He’s left plenty of them in his wake, but there was never any cause to stop and clean up the mess, piece together the shell into something that more resembled what it had been in life, when it was a  _ he  _ or  _ she  _ or  _ they  _ instead of an  _ it.  _

He kneels at the side of the corpse that was once Armitage Hux and takes off his cloak, spreads its coarse fabric out on the durasteel floor and makes sure there are no snags before he fits his hands beneath what were once Hux’s knees and shoulders and now are just  _ the body’s  _ knees and shoulders. Hux never seemed so small, nor so light, when he inhabited this frame. Or maybe he did, and Kylo was just always too preoccupied with his mind, the sweeping vastness of all his knowledge and plans and opinions and memories. He was always so much  _ fuller  _ than Kylo ever even  _ dreamt  _ about being. 

As he tucks the fabric tight around the body he can’t help but picture Hux sneering at the common feel of it, the rough-hewn nature of the weft of the wool.  _ I’m sorry I didn’t prepare a better shroud for you then, your highness,  _ he imagines saying back to Hux’s snobbery, imagines how his lips would curl into an unwilling smile, like they always did when the two of them were alone and Hux kept up his act of head-tossing too-goodness before all of that melted away into fond silence, thought-sharing between them as their bare skin pressed together and neither of them pretended to care about thread count or stitch quality. 

He has never wrapped up a body in this manner, but at the back of his mind there is always his Knights, and they buzz and peel themselves open to show him the way. Dir Ren had a wife, once, who died in childbirth. He wrapped her in the stained silk sheets from their bed to prepare her for the pyre, in the tradition of their people. Kylo hears the faint strains of an infant fretting in the background of the memory and his hands know how to free one of the cords from his garments, how to neatly tie the whole wrap together so that it won’t come undone. He hefts the wrapped corpse up and wonders with sickened apathy at how different the feel of it is, how once he touched this body and it was warm and yielding and smiled at him and the mind and spirit it contained made him feel mindless with affection and wonder and protectiveness and lust. 

His uncle and the scavenger are silent, walking in stride with him to their transport. It is the  _ Millennium Falcon _ , and Kylo carries his burden with his back straight and his chest hollowed out like a rotted tree still standing tall, no matter that its branches will never bloom again and its roots decay beneath the soil. His uncle’s silence is not strained-- he is all calm waters, no ripple of fear or doubt. It is a change; when the Knight was young and answered to the name  _ Ben Solo  _ because he had no other choice, Luke Skywalker was flush with anxiety and insecurity and a burning desire to prove himself. The man before him knows what awaits them all at the end. 

The scavenger is still full of fear and revulsion and panic, a swimmer trying to keep her head above choppy waters made perilous by her own thrashing. She is untaught; Kylo remembers when he thought to take her on as a pupil, thought to teach her how to breathe beneath the water, how to become the sea. Now there is no room for that; he is sinking further and further and he couldn’t reach her now even if he tried. 

He holds the body close to him. It is not even the  _ tenth  _ most gruesome thing he has ever done in his life. He wonders if its hair still smells like Hux’s preferred pomade, or if all of that vaporized with the sweat from the heat of battle. 

_ Ben, come with us. It’s time.  _ That is all it had taken, because he knew it to be true in that instant. It was time to stop this. Before, there was anger to fuel him, and then there was a desire to become one with the Force. When he became a Knight, he was gorging himself on pleasure and pain and the sensation of no longer being an outcast, trying to find a reason to keep on. And then,  _ Hux.  _ He had been besotted from the start; he had seen the drive in the other man that he so sorely lacked, and knew that they were a perfect compliment, or at least a functional commensalistic symbiotic pair. And then his father was dead and there were all of these things he noticed that he hadn’t understood before-- the mint-musk scent of Hux’s pomade, the little bags of dried jasmine and violet petals he kept in his dresser drawers that reminded him of his mother, the dip of Hux’s lower back and the dimples there, exposed when he got out of the fresher and wore only a towel in the morning, stood at the sink to dress his hair. His knobby knees and the way he nibbled the inside of his cheek with his eye teeth when he was reading a book. 

He noticed all of it, and yet he sits with his arms wrapped around a corpse and knows to his core that there were countless things he did not notice, mannerisms he didn’t catch, moments he did not stop to commit to memory. Now it’s too late; they will never meet again. There will never be a time when he can again try to count Hux’s eyelashes; Hux will never again surprise him as he did the night before, when he was the initiator of their sexual intimacy. He will never wake up to Hux’s soft snores in his ear or scritch Millicent’s ears again so as to see the softness in Hux’s eyes when he took the pair of them in. 

He wants to speak, to beg-- to pretend like this corpse is still aware, or that Hux lingers unseen on the air.  _ Come back,  _ he would plead,  _ don’t leave me to do this on my own. Please. Please. Don’t leave me.  _ He would beg to be haunted by Hux’s ghost, to be always mired in the faint echoes of his mind. He would destroy  _ everything  _ if he thought there were any hope, any chance. 

But there is not; there is only this, the here and the now. There is what he has done, and what he must do. 

The Resistance base is busy, abuzz with their victory, the assumption that they stand a fighting chance on their own, but everything grows silent when he exits the  _ Falcon  _ behind his uncle and the scavenger, Hux’s body held like a smiling maiden bride might be in his arms. 

His mother doesn’t run to him, but stands stock-still for so long that he thinks she’ll stay that way for the rest of her life. 

Later, he digs a grave for Hux with his bare hands and the Force, breathes deeply to memorize the way the dirt smells, runs his hands soothingly down the shroud to make it lay neater. When the hole is filled in and packed tight, he lays down on top of it, cloakless and bereft. Above his head the sky is dark and full of stars, and the Force does not whisper  _ Starkiller  _ because there is no reason for it to. Its destroyer is dead, beyond its reach. Beyond his reach. 

He breathes harshly through his nose, in and out; he has not wept in a long time, but he thinks he could, now. He was never meant to be alone; he was  _ always  _ meant to be alone. 

Inside, the Resistance’s war council  _ rages.  _ It  _ rails.  _ They spit bone-splitting truths and accusations and his mother’s spine is straight but her spirit is crushed beneath the weight of all of their contempt. 

He enters the room and if he was his younger self, he’d have barked an acidic laugh at the way they all quiet, at how many hands twitch towards weapons. He was full of anger, full of willful incomprehension. Still operating under the assumption that he was a person, just like everyone else. 

He was never going to be a person. He was never going to be Ben Solo. 

_ You will all die eventually,  _ he says, quietly, because there is no point in shouting. They are all listening to him. Isn’t that what the child called Ben Solo had always wanted? To be listened to?  _ The Supreme Leader cannot be killed by anyone but me.  _

His words are met first with stunned silence and then injured pride and storied hatred; he waits, because he has enough time to. There is nothing else but this; getting a transport, going to finish this task. And then, he can embrace the inevitable, become  _ truly  _ one with the Force. That is all that is left for him. 

His uncle rises and speaks, says  _ Ben is right. I have seen the outcome. He is the only one that can stop Snoke and restore peace to the galaxy,  _ useless placations that Kylo doesn’t focus on. His mother’s mind tries to prod at his; he breathes and reinforces the edges of his awareness to keep her out. He’ll cause her enough pain with his body’s death; she would not like to see inside his mind. 

Eventually, they agree to give him a transport. He realizes that he’s  _ exhausted,  _ in body and in mind. He’d like to leave straightaway, stop prolonging the inevitable. He decides to wait for a night, at least. He’s shown to a cell and he laughs and can’t help it-- do they think a cell will hold him? The Force is  _ boiling  _ in his veins now, leeching through his skin, no longer just around him. It’s been waiting for a long time, and now it knows that the waiting is almost done. 

He sleeps for a few hours on a cot and wakes with the knowledge that his uncle has been in the room for a while. When he opens his eyes, Luke is sitting with his back to the wall and his eyes closed, mocking meditation and just dozing. 

He doesn’t speak, just reaches out a thought.  _ Why are you here.  _ It’s no question. 

_ I’m sorry you never got to really live,  _ his uncle replies, speaking aloud as if that makes the words truer or gives them more meaning.  _ I’ve been waiting for you to be ready to return.  _ And isn’t that just like him, Kylo thinks, still heavy with sleep. Prioritizing his nephew’s life over the rest of the galaxy.  _ You had to be ready,  _ Luke insists, and Kylo supposes it’s so. He wouldn’t have killed Snoke five years ago, and wouldn’t have been  _ able _ to kill him ten years ago. 

He sighs and rolls onto his back to stare at the ceiling. They don't talk about the Younglings. 

He sleeps a little longer and wakes to his mother’s hand in his hair. It's-- not exactly  _ unpleasant,  _ but he is very aware that the last person to touch his uncovered hair was Hux. He thought his body would die with that still being true. 

_ Ben,  _ she mouths silently, and her shoulders shake and she has never looked so old and so young to him. He doesn't know how to comfort her-- any placating would be lies, any apologies would fall short and ring with unsaid words. She has spent years obsessively thinking of this moment, waiting for her chance to bask in his presence like she had never done before. She'd never had a mother, not really.  _ I remember a woman, with flowers in her hair,  _ he has heard her say in Luke’s memories. They are the only words she has ever spoken about his maternal grandmother, at least to his knowledge. 

He settles for lying still and allowing her this. She stands until her knees ache, and then she keeps standing. He just breathes and keeps his borders drawn tight around his mind like a security blanket. 

When it's time for him to leave, he reaches out a hand and wraps it fully around hers like he's cradling an injured bird. She inhales, startled. It's a wet sound-- she's been crying for a while. 

He opens himself up enough to show her Hux’s memories-- she goes tense and resists but he-- he  _ has  _ to do this. He has to. He shows her starving children brainwashed by their parents, reinforced in their beliefs by the place they now hold (or  _ don't _ ) in society. He shows her a skeleton-slim teenager in ragged shoes shivering his way to a bar to allow himself to be abused for the sake of his continued survival, and that of his comrades.  _ I was a child,  _ Hux’s voice echoes ghostly over the scene, and Kylo wants to live in his own memories of the other man. He aches but he shows his mother what she needs to see. The location of the First Order’s adopted homeworld, where to find the children that will be orphaned or worse once Snoke is dead. Where to find the Stormtrooper corps’ barracks and the child-killers it contains. 

When he lets her go she gasps and turns so he cannot see her face. 

_ Ben,  _ she whispers throatily one last time, and he hears the  _ I love you  _ she wants to say and can't force out. 

He takes the  _ Falcon  _ because maybe he does have some sentiment left underneath all the ash, after all. 

The Knights nudge his consciousness; they know they are about to become five again. They are going to lose him to the Force more than they already have. Lulen Ren is closer geographically to him than the others, and her presence is more tethered and evident. He feels as though she's pressed all along his back, like she's holding his ribs together until they're allowed to break apart. Dir Ren shares his battlelust-- he is systems away, up against some primordial beast for the challenge of it, for the pleasure that will come-- either from death or victory. Pyka Ren lies abed with three Chiss and shares xir lusty pleasure through their link. Rycir Ren and Carix Ren are together as always, and lying in a cool, dark room with a holodrama playing, enjoying being close to each other. They share that contentment with him. He is a feedback loop of bolstering affection and farewell and strength. He loves them for it, with the sort of wildness that comes naturally to one who has gone through the Trials of Ren and come out the other side, cracked open and starving for everything and anything but  _ alive.  _

The jump to hyperspace is as jolting as he remembers it being when he was a child; he does not wish his father was here, and he does not imagine that Han Solo is somehow watching over him. Still, the memory of his father’s hand curling around his cheek is fresh enough to cause a half second’s pang of apology. 

His master waits for him; he feels the anticipation as soon as he's got his feet on solid ground. The planet is small and more than simply forgotten-- it is abandoned, and purposefully so. The ruins of a once-staggering Sith temple lay before him, half-swallowed by black jungle. The air is cool. Snoke waits for him. 

He is a ruined thing on a ruined throne, and yet his power is immense-- his control over the Force is that of twenty true Master Jedi Knights.

He has no lightsaber; he remembers when he had one, when he was more man than ghoulish relic.  _ Plagueis,  _ the room whispers, the Force daring to call him by the name he took for himself once, instead of the guise he now hides behind. 

_ My apprentice,  _ Snoke rasps, and Kylo braces himself. 

The pain that comes is excruciating-- he falls to his knees, wracked with it. It feels as if every one of his nerve endings is on fire, or drenched in acid, or--  _ it hurts.  _ It hurts, but he has been hurting for a long time. He has spent a lifetime pushing himself through muddied battlefields half-dead, punishing himself with overlong workouts and training, hurting himself to feel  _ something.  _

In the end, pain is a bodily function. In order to escape it, in order to overcome Snoke, he must leave bodily functions behind. He must leave his body behind. 

_ Grandfather,  _ he calls out to the Force, and explodes out from his skin. 

Snoke dies smothered by the Force he thought to tame and tether and control, calm facade ripped away to reveal the screaming, furious creature beneath. Once, he was a handsome Munn called Nyx Klaveen who became a powerful Sith. He took the name Darth Plagueis. His only fear was to lose his power, and thus, to die. 

He dies  _ screaming.  _

And Kylo Ren becomes one with the Force. 

Kylo Ren  _ becomes  _ the Force. 


End file.
